The beginning of the end

So I was reading through a selection of different blogs that I happened to come across and this particular one here peaked my interest.

The writer is discussing what happens when a long established guild dies or falls apart, this is a subject that is actually pretty close to my own heart at the moment.

The reason for this is that our LOTRO (Lord of the rings online) Kin is dying. Let me set the scene for you; our kinship was founded when the first expansion pack, Mines of Moria, was released. It was made up of a core of players who had all been around for a while and had all been in other kins and weren’t particularly happy.

In other kins most of the emphasis had been on completing as many end game runs as possible and other than people who were twinking their alts there hadn’t been much help coming down the ladder to newer players.

We decided to change that, we wanted everyone to have equal access to loot, the guild bank, help with quests and runs etc and it worked. Boy did it work, by the middle of summer last year we had over 1300 members and were the largest guild on our server, Nimrodel.

We had a good group of officers who made sure that everything ran according to plan, we actively enforced our policy regarding levels of activity (in active for more than 30 days and your gone) and it looked like the world was our mollusc! Because of the high levels of help offered by more experienced members we were able to level new players very quickly, we had 24 hour officer coverage to make sure that there was always at least two high level toons online to help settle disputes or assist with runs, in short it was what we had wanted when the guild was founded.

Then it all suddenly seemed to go wrong; squabbles and arguments started breaking out more and more frequently, the levels of booting activity started to rise exponentionally, large amounts of high end items started to vanish from the kin chests and they had to be locked down to just officers, runs and raids that we could finish easilly started to go awry. Everything that could go wrong was going wrong.

Jump forward a little bit to February this year; because of the problems that had existed over the past few months a fairly large number of officers had left, so too had a very substantial number of other kin members – we now had just over 600, sure new members still joined up but it wasn’t the same. The original spirit and drive that had existed had gone and no matter what we tried it just wasn’t coming back.

As it stands at the moment the kin is dying on it’s feet, we keep trying and trying but we are fighting a losing battle, we all know it is going to happen at some point the only question that remains is when.

Do we keep on fighting the good fight until things fall apart by themselves or do we call it quits of our own accord?

Personally I have always been a fan of picking my own fate as much as possible.